Friday, October 17, 2014

12 – AFTERMATH -- “Grand Canyon Rafting – A Dozen Little Stories”

“When do you think I’ll stop thinking every
day about the Canyon?” Eva asked me recently.

“Hopefully,
never,” I said.

* * *

A trip
through the Grand Canyon messes with your mind. How can anyone experience the
Canyon and not have their perspective shocked regarding their place in the
universe?

Right there
in the rocks before your eyes is the earth’s record of much of the past two billion
years. You touch the evidence with your hands – like worm burrows in layers of the
glauconite-green Bright Angel Shale. Once this rock was mud and sand on the
bottom of a shallow-water ocean in a time before there were fish, yet swarming
with exotic creatures – trilobites, mollusks, snails, sponges, algae, and worms.
Today, traces of their lives’ scurrying and burrowing are frozen in cliffs high
and dry above the Colorado River. A lot can happen in 500 million years.

Since
returning from our trip to my retired life in Oregon, I’ve tried to expand my meager
understanding of the Grand Canyon’s rocks. I’ve slogged through the 432-page Grand Canyon Geology. I was amazed by
how much detail scientists can explain about that two billion-year history. (And
by how little I could completely understand, despite my college degree in
geology.)Knowing its
past so well, geologists confidently predict the Grand Canyon’s future:

“The outcome
is fairly well assured. The plateaus surrounding the Grand Canyon will continue
to fragment by extensional faulting. Erosion will continue to wash the elevated
rocks to the sea. The canyon will gradually disappear. Someday the seas will
return and deposit new rocks here. Perhaps Ecclesiastes (1:9) said it best:
‘The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is
that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.’” –Peter W.
Huntoon (“Post-Precambrian Tectonism in the Grand Canyon Region,” in Grand Canyon Geology, 2003, Eds.: S.S.
Beus & M. Morales)

There
remain mysteries of the Grand Canyon yet to be solved. For me,
here’s the biggest one of all:

Early in our
trip after Boatman Art had painted for us the big picture of the Grand Canyon’s
geologic history, I asked him, “Do you ever get Creationists on your trips,
people who believe all this happened in seven days, 6,000 years ago?”

Art said
that he did.

“How in the
world do they reconcile what they see here with their beliefs?”

“People have
all different points of view,” Art said, patiently, “and that’s all right.”

I couldn’t
tell if he was being diplomatic or if he really believed that, but I blurted
out: “No it’s not all right!”

We hiked one
day up to see Indian pictographs – images long ago burnished into vertical
cliff faces. Who were the people who made them? What visions inspired them? Did
the locally-abundant Datura, a
dangerous psychotropic plant, have anything to do with those visions?

Maybe the
images were left on the cliffs, as some believe, by aliens from other worlds.
Not likely, of course, but more plausible to me than an entire cosmic creation
laid down in less time than we took to float through the Grand Canyon. To
believe, literally, the Biblical tale, then you also must believe that all the evidence
of geology, paleontology, and just plain common sense is an elaborate hoax of
the Creator, a practical joke, an omnipotent trick, God’s shenanigans.

The night
sky over the Grand Canyon is filled with its own mysteries. The Milky Way is
right there, a glittering swath of stars and worlds we’ll never know. Just as
most of us can’t easily read the stories in the Canyon’s rocks, we can’t fathom
what is out there. But while geologists probe the rocks’ stories with hammers
and microscopes, astronomers use complex instruments to see light and hear
signals from near the very beginning of the universe.

If you could
peer into that night sky far enough, it would be like going back in time –
before the Grand Canyon’s Zoroaster Granite was molten rock 1.7 billion years
ago, before the 4.5 billion-year-old earth existed, back to the Big Bang nearly
14 billion years ago, and before that… Bazinga!

It’s
nonsense, of course, since time didn’t exist before the Big Bang, as the
world’s greatest minds explain. And as if that’s not maddening enough, astrophysicists
tell us of mysterious black holes, dark energy, and multiple dimensions beyond
space and time. Do we live, not in a universe, but in a multiverse? Are there
infinite universes? Is everything we think we understand about reality as far
from truth as a seven-day creation story?

* * *

The
government recently announced that in America we’re living longer than ever
before. At my age, that's good news. According to the new data, I should have
another fifteen “years of life left,” as the newspaper bluntly put it.

My dentist had
seen the same story. We were talking about how long my gold crowns might last
and he told me he has a dozen or so patients in their nineties and more, and
they still have good teeth and aren’t treating them like they only have to last
a little bit longer. He said my gold crowns could last forever.

How long is
forever? I suppose for all practical purposes, for me it’s fifteen years, plus
or minus. Hopefully, plus. My dentist and I agreed that both of us were going
to beat the averages, but still…

How on earth
can we reckon our personal time scale with the Grand Canyon’s billions of years
or with the cosmology of a forever multiverse? I can see how it might be
comforting to invent a god (or gods) to try and make some kind of sense of all
this unknowable mystery.

The geologic
history of the Grand Canyon, however, no longer falls into that “unknowable
mystery” category. Actually, that’s been the case for nearly 150 years, but I
guess some people are slow to change. I just don’t understand, though, why
anyone would need to believe in a god who goes to such lengths to fool scientists into
thinking the universe, including the Grand Canyon, wasn’t created in the last
6,000 years?

On the other
hand, for millennia people all over the world have believed in trickster gods.
So what do I know?

* * *

Some might
argue about how the Grand Canyon got made, but anyone who has been there probably
can agree that it is, as John Wesley Powell put it, “the most sublime spectacle
on earth.” No landscape can surpass its grandeur – both great and small. It’s
so big and breathtaking that it is hard to hold in your head, especially after
you leave. Small memories of spectacle linger more easily: snake tracks in dry
sand, a bighorn ram ambling riverside and ignoring rafters' excited chatter, a posse
of ravens harassing a golden eagle, a chorus line of black-necked stilts
strutting in the shallows like tuxedo-clad dancers.

During our
recent excursion, thirty-two of us shared far more than a scenic boat ride with
heart-stopping white-water rapids. In the forced intimacy of rafting and
camping together, old friendships were deepened and new ones forged, and how
often can you say that?

* * *

There’s a
lot about the Grand Canyon that’s no longer “natural.” Dams, climate change,
invasive plants, and visitors have changed things. After all, millions of
people come to the Grand Canyon every year and peer down from its rims; 27,000
float the river each season. Developers still hustle absurd plans, the latest
on Indian land with some Native Americans backing a proposed desecration that would
exploit the Canyon’s world-famous allure.

Yet the Grand
Canyon endures. Those who love it most – the river guides and their companies,
scientists, park rangers, artists, and natives – have found a good balance. The
Canyon, despite demands to love it to death, is well-managed. If, heaven
forbid, I never get back there again, I’m confident that the Grand Canyon that
so touched my soul will be there as I remember it for my grandchildren.

Our rafting
trip ended on the eighth day, just the right length of time. That surprised me;
at the beginning of the trip I could barely stand the thought that our
adventure would too soon be over. It turned out that after a week of playing
hard, I was exhausted. Used up. Content to have our perfect moment end.

As the days
of our lives rush by, we can only hope they end in so gracious a manner – just
enough time and not too much. Meanwhile, I’ve still got another fifteen years (plus
or minus), which should give Eva and me plenty of time for at least one more ride
down that river through the Grand Canyon. Maybe I’ll see you there.

"Eventually, all things merge into one and a river runs through it." --Norman Maclean